Der Rhein

Some landscapes in the Ashmolean's exhibition Anselm Kiefer: Early Works, with quotes from the accompanying wall texts. 

Der Rhein (The Rhine), 1982 

'The Rhine has been a German national symbol while also providing a border to France. During the Romantic era of the early 19th century, countless travelogues by writers such as Friedrich Hölderlin and paintings by J.M.W. Turner helped develop a fascination with the beauty of Rhine landscapes. The river also played a major role in Wagner's opera cycle, The Ring. Kiefer's woodcut collage, however, is equally concerned with the political connotations of the Rhine, merging its landscape with National Socialist architecture.'

The building in Der Rhein relates to a series paintings showing Nazi architecture Kiefer made in the early eighties - the exhibition included a watercolour, Innenraum (1982) of Albert Speer's New Reich Chancellery, destroyed in 1945. Christie's sold a similar woodcut to Der Rhein for £313K in 2012 and their description includes this quote from Kiefer: ''I grew up on the banks of the Rhine. France was on the other side. As a child, I saw the river as an insuperable obstacle, something you couldn't swim across. It thus acquired a mythical status for me. When you came to this barrier you could turn left or right but not go straight ahead, except in your imagination." The Rhine (Melancholia) is the name of an Anselm Kiefer installation I wrote about in 2014, 'a collage of black-and-white woodcuts on canvas with acrylic and shellac compiled over more than two decades, between 1982 and 2013.' 

Unternehmen 'Trappenfang' (Operation Bustard Hunt), 1976 

'The title of this painting references a WWII military codename, 'Unternehmen Trappenjagd' ('Operation Bustard Hunt'). The words summon the aftermath of an attack, a landscape scarred by the treads of troop movements and tanks. In May 1942, Germany bombed the easternmost tip of Crimea, the Kerch Peninsula, amplifying the destruction by artillery and tank divisions. Looming above Kiefer's scene is not a bustard but a large painter's palette, linking war memory with an emblem of artistic identity.'

Kiefer often uses high horizons with paths heading towards them, invoking ideas of motion through time. This horizon has a snow covered village, a dark church spire and a bleak grey sky. Looking here at how he was painting fifty years ago, I thought how similar it is in many ways to Kiefer's most recent work, which we have seen in shows at the White Cube gallery. His Superstrings for example, which I discussed here in 2019, are 'desolate landscapes of earth, snow, muddy water, stubble, straw and leafless trees.' I said then that I could see a connection between such paintings and Van Gogh's ploughed fields, something that may well be apparent in the forthcoming Royal Academy exhibition that will pair the two artists. 

Ausbrennen des Landkreises Buchen (Burning of the Rural District of Buchen), 1974 

'This book features photographs of Buchen, where the artist's studio was located, and carbonized sections of former paintings. The photos initially focus on farmland and streets, before showing staged explosions. The final pages present charcoal-encrusted paper. Devoid of people, the photographs allude to the economic decline of Buchen. The explosions also reference the presence of the German armed forces.'

Matthew Biro's Phaidon monograph on Kiefer has a section on this work. 'Leafing through the book engenders a sense of moving through Kiefer's rural environment', but what starts as apparently simple representations of specific geographic regions end up with images overpainted in black wash, singular 'originals' rather than repeatable photographic reproductions. At this time Kiefer was interested in ideas of destruction: 'in addition to burning a town, as it were, Kiefer also flooded Heidelberg in two volumes from 1969 and covered the Brandenburg Heath with sand in four tomes from 1976'. The Ashmolean exhibition had the original 1974 Buchen book, but Kiefer made seven more on the same theme the following year. I referred to one of these in a previous post and quoted Martin Gayford: 'this is how the traditions of Friedrich and Schinkel looked and felt to Kiefer in the aftermath of the Third Reich: burnt out, haunted by overpowering, terrible events.'

Stefan I, 1975

Poet and translator Stefan Anton George was embraced by the Nazis as a hero, despite his criticism of National Socialism and self-imposed exile to Switzerland. In Kiefer's surreal paintings he appears to be resting on his death bed. The works allude to the charged complexities of German cultural heritage and present an attempt to redeem George from political exploitation. 

I can never resist a giant figure in a landscape (see various previous posts) and the exhibition had two watercolours of Stefan George as a mountain. In the other one a sun is setting behind slopes that incorporate his head, and there is an inscription 'aller Tage Abend, aller Abende Tag' (the Evening of All Days, the Days of All Evenings). This is a reference to Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope, which encourages positive social change, a book with a utopian message that was influential when these paintings were made.

Die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter (Art Will Survive its Ruins), 1975 

'Kiefer travelled to Norway's North Cape, where summer sunlight appears never ending. The location was associated with a 1943 battle, when a German battlecruiser was sunk by a British ship. Over 1900 people drowned. Kiefer's title refers to German post-war discourse on art which had been censored, denunciated or misused to propagate Nazi ideologies. As the German title of Kiefer's work suggests, art almost 'drowned'. The North Cape, however, shaped through several ice ages, is representative of survival.'

I have written here before about the North Cape, subject of some eerie nineteenth century landscape paintings by the Peder Balke. Kiefer visited in 1974 and described the experience in an interview with Klaud Dermutz. 'I’d spent some time that summer on North Cape and there you have that phenomenon in which the sun barely sets. It grazes the horizon and then rises again. This made a deep impression on me, the way the sun at first appears to set but then doesn’t. On the watercolour Nordkap [North Cape, 1975], I wrote ‘die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter’ [art just barely avoids going under or just barely survives]. It’s very difficult to define art, impossible, in fact. It can’t really be grasped. Art is like a fish you pull out of the water that then slips away from you. Art is always very endangered, constantly under threat.'

River in the Catskills

Thomas Cole, River in the Catskills, 1843

Source: Wikimedia Commons

What was the first appearance of a train in a painting? Most people know Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), which is the earliest example listed on a Wikipedia page dedicated to railways and art. However, visitors to the National Gallery's Thomas Cole exhibition will see an earlier one in the painting reproduced above, River in the Catskills (1843).  At the scale you're reading this you probably can't see the train, just a faint puff of steam in an idyllic landscape.  But the railroad is in place and there are other signs too that the landscape is being changed - in the foreground men are chopping down trees.  At the exhibition this painting is juxtaposed with a similar view painted in the 1830s, showing a vision of America unsullied.  A baby reaches for the bouquet of wild flowers her mother has picked and on the gentle river an Indian canoe suggests a world of harmonious coexistence. However, as the curators point out, not everyone regretted the way things were going - there is a third view of this river by Asher Brown Durand, painted in 1853, with unmistakable signs of alteration and 'development', entitled Progress (The Advance of Civilisation).

Detail of River in the Catskills showing the train

Source: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Thomas Cole, View on the Catskill – Early Autumn, 1836-7

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Detail of View on the Catskill

Source: Wikimedia Commons

It would probably take too long to write here about the main subject of the National Gallery's exhibition, Cole's series of paintings charting The Course of Empire, or about their simultaneous Ed Ruscha show that updates the theme and raises questions about contemporary America.  You can read about these in various online reviews - e.g. Jonathan Jones, Waldemar Janusczcak, Michael Glover.  Instead I will just add a few words more on Cole's remarkable painting Titan's Goblet which normally hangs in the Met, where its curators admit that it 'defies explanation'.  This huge stone goblet is higher than the surrounding mountains and along its rim there are is a flourishing civilisation.  Water falls like divine light onto the ground far below, where there are also signs of habitation but of a more primitive kind.  That small sunlit sea, framed by the goblet's rim, is a landscape-within-a-landscape.  But it could also be viewed as an unusual example of the hybrid genre I discussed in connection with Tacita Dean recently, the still-life-within-a-landscape.  You can lose yourself in most of Cole's paintings but this is particularly true here.  His friend Louis Legrand Noble saw a kind of Mediterranean in those waters, where tourists might travel to versions of Greece or Syria, tracing their fancies in 'in the golden splendours of a summer sunset.'

Thomas Cole, Titan's Goblet, 1833

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Detail of Titan's Goblet

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Ideas for Sculpture in a Setting

Paul Nash, Event on the Downs, 1934

The Tacita Dean exhibition Landscape starts today, but before I get to that, I wanted to mention here the Still Life exhibition which is still on for a few more days at the National Gallery.  It is free, unlike Landscape and Portrait, and it also incorporates other artists' work (and so reminded me of An Aside, the excellent exhibition she curated back in 2005 at Camden Arts Centre).  It includes examples of an overlapping genre, 'still life in a landscape', of which Event on the Downs is a famous example.  Long before Surrealism though, Thomas Robert Guest was recording archaeological finds by painting them close to, towering over the places in which they were found.  There is a Tate Paper ('Thomas Guest and Paul Nash in Wiltshire') with more information on the rediscovery of Guest's paintings in the late 1930s.  Such hybrid works, situating the still life in a landscape, differ from the kind of painting I featured here last year, where the two form separate worlds within the same artwork.  John Crome's Study of Flints is another example, similar in composition to Guest's paintings.  In the exhibition it is represented not by the original but by a postcard (Tacita Dean is known for collecting and using postcards in her art).  Crome's painting relates closely to two of Dean's own works, films of flints owned by in Henry Moore, called Ideas for Sculpture in a Setting (Diptych) (2017).

Thomas Robert Guest, Bronze Age Grave Goods from a Bell Barrow

Excavated at Winterslow, Wiltshire, 1814
 

John Crome, Study of Flints, c. 1811

In her introduction to the catalogue, Tacita Dean writes about a Paul Nash painting that manages to combine all three genres: landscape, portraiture and still life.  Cumulus Head is 'said to be a portrait of his wife, Margaret.  She appears in a cumulus cloud landscape with a green, possibly grass, middle ground.'  Furthermore, this portrait 'is painted as a statue head carved in stone and mounted on what appears to be a stepped pedestal.'  There is nothing quite like this in the exhibition^*, although the human form is evoked in Two White Manikins by Albert Reuss (the manikins are propped up among rocks in what looks like a desert).  There is though one small, strange work from the National Gallery's own collection, which from a distance appears to be another close-up view of a flint-like rock.  It includes two figures, plus an angel who is probably part of a scene that was cut from the panel.  St Benedict is in a cave, receiving food lowered down to him by St. Romanus.  But, as Marjorie E. Wieseman writes in the catalogue, 'whether by accident or design, Romanus' grey robed figure seems to rise out of / melt into the rocky forms encroaching Benedict's hermitage, inviting fantasies of a landscape come alive or, alternatively, of a figure turned to stone and subsumed into the land itself.  The stillness come awake; or life, become still.'

Paul Nash, Cumulus Head, c. 1944

Workshop of Lorenzo Monaco, Saint Benedict 

in the Sacro Speco at Subiaco, c. 1415-20

  

^* the Paul Nash painting Cumulus Head is actually included at the RA in the third part of the Tacita Dean exhibition, 'Landscape'. 

Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun

Nicholas Poussin, Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, 1658

I write this surrounded by piles of books with a couple of pictures propped against them.  This would be pleasant except that they've all been brought upstairs to be out of the way of some imminent building work.  Sadly there's too much I've got to do here in the house to spend time writing anything very thoughtful about landscape and art.  So here instead I will just give you a couple of beautifully written passages from an essay by William Hazlitt, 'On a Landscape of Nicholas Poussin.'

'Orion, the subject of this landscape, was the classical Nimrod; and is called by Homer, 'a hunter of shadows, himself a shade.' [...] Mists rise around him, and veil the sides of the green forests; earth is dank and fresh with dews, the 'gray dawn and the Pleiades before him dance,' and in the distance are seen the blue hills and sullen ocean. Nothing was ever more finely conceived or done. It breathes the spirit of the morning; its moisture, its repose, its obscurity, waiting the miracle of light to kindle it into smiles; the whole is, like the principal figure in it, 'a forerunner of the dawn.' The same atmosphere tinges and imbues every object, the same dull light 'shadowy sets off' the face of nature: one feeling of vastness, of strangeness, and of primeval forms pervades the painter's canvas, and we are thrown back upon the first integrity of things. [...] To give us nature, such as we see it, is well and deserving of praise; to give us nature, such as we have never seen, but have often wished to see it, is better, and deserving of higher praise. He who can show the world in its first naked glory, with the hues of fancy spread over it, or in its high and palmy state, with the gravity of history stamped on the proud monuments of vanished empire,--who, by his 'so potent art,' can recall time past, transport us to distant places, and join the regions of imagination (a new conquest) to those of reality,--who shows us not only what Nature is, but what she has been, and is capable of,--he who does this, and does it with simplicity, with truth, and grandeur, is lord of Nature and her powers; and his mind is universal, and his art the master-art!'

Poussin's Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun is now owned by the Met but when Hazlitt saw it, the painting was 'one of a series from the old masters, which have for some years back embrowned the walls of the British Gallery, and enriched the public eye.'  His essay praises what were the world's first regular temporary exhibitions of Old Master paintings.  Pictures, he concludes, 'are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding left, not quite rubbed off, dishonoured, and defaced.'  I don't think Hazlitt would have thought much of the Alexander Calder lithograph I'm about to pack away in an old sheet for a few months.  But he would have agreed that to take pleasure from art it is unnecessary to have pictures hanging on the walls around you.

'Pictures are a set of chosen images, a stream of pleasant thoughts passing through the mind. It is a luxury to have the walls of our rooms hung round with them, and no less so to have such a gallery in the mind, to con over the relies of ancient art bound up 'within the book and volume of the brain, unmixed (if it were possible) with baser matter!' A life passed among pictures, in the study and the love of art, is a happy noiseless dream: or rather, it is to dream and to be awake at the same time; for it has all 'the sober certainty of waking bliss,' with the romantic voluptuousness of a visionary and abstracted being.' 

The holy mount for the Festival of the Supreme Being

Pierre-Antoine Demachy, The Festival of the Supreme Being, 1794

On 8 June 1794 (20 Prairial Year II) an artificial landscape was erected in the centre of Paris.  This day had been chosen for the first Celebration of the Supreme Being, a new godhead devised by Robespierre, then at the zenith of power.  He had been elected President of the Convention four days earlier; less than two months later he would be guillotined without trial in the Place de la Révolution.  The landscape was designed by the great revolutionary artist Jacques-Louis David.  A plaster-and cardboard mountain topped with a liberty tree was built on the Champ de Mars.  That afternoon, as Simon Schama writes in Citizens, 'deputies of the Convention climbed to the summit and looked down to the twenty-four hundred deployed along the paths, slopes and terraces that had been cut into the mountain.  At a crucial moment, when the singing and blaring of martial brass had been silenced, Robespierre descended from the mountain like some Jacobinical Moses, parting the waves of tricolored patriots, and graciously received the burst of orchestrated applause that broke over his head.'  Jacques-Alexis Thuriot, a former president of the Convention, was heard saying, "Look at the bugger; it’s not enough for him to be master, he has to be God".

Thomas Naudet, Festival of the Supreme Being at the Champs-de-Mars, 1794

 
What kind of mountain would be adequate for the Supreme Being?  Not, it would seem from contemporary prints, a perfectly shaped one.  In his book Political Landscape, in a section that discusses the perennial desire of leaders to carve massive statues and faces into mountains, Martin Warnke remarks on this:

'The mount as a whole appears strangely rugged, as if its irregular shape had been copied from works by Mantegna; what we see is a kind of nature monument that could be construed as an enormous head, but the caverns, paths and platforms also serve to direct the movement of the crowd: the men march on the right, the women on the left; the young people march round the hill, and a special commissaire sees to it that there is no confusion.  Only optically does the landscape admit of irregularity and contingency.  It belongs to the type of fantastic landscape that once rose towards gold skies in the backgrounds of altarpieces, in the early days of landscape painting.  Yet the overall physiognomy of the rock still has some of the impressive force attributed to faces in mountains.'

Lorca's Olive

Laurie Clark, To The Hills, 2006

A recent survey by Jeremy Cooper, Artists' Postcards: A Compendium, divides the field into ten categories (aside from promotional postcards), each of which could be illustrated with cases involving landscape imagery.

• Artist-designed postcards - there are many examples; in an earlier post here I am holding up one that features in the book - by Francis Alÿs, a view of a flat sea with a description of the artist's journey on the reverse.  See also the postcard by Laurie Clark above.  Artists have been designing postcards since their invention.  The future Expressionist Emil Nolde earned money by designing them in the 1890s and his strangest designs were a sequence of giant faces drawn into mountain ranges.

• Manipulated postcards - where artists overpaint or erase parts of an image; in Bridges for example Tim Davies covers over the landscape to leave their structures floating in space.  I get the impression many artists have done this privately - I've referred before to playful postcards sent to friends by Peter Lanyon and Cooper includes an example by Josef Albers in which he has overwritten an aerial view of the woods near Black Mountain College.

• Composite postcard pieces - a fine example of an installation involving a collection of photographs is Susan Hiller's Rough Seas, which I described here at the time of her Tate exhibition.

• Postcards in collage - John Stezaker's uncanny film star portraits with landscape postcards over their faces are a well-known example (on show at the Whitechapel recently).

• Boxes, sets and books of postcards - among the book's examples of these kinds of work there is Carl Andre's Three Works on Land (1979), a concertina of nine black-and-white postcards documenting three land art sculptures: 'Angellipse', 'Timbering' and 'Quadrill'.

• Postcards in mail art - this art form which emerged alongside Fluxus is obviously central to a discussion of postcards in art and the book includes many examples. Michael Leigh's The Arses of Scotland (1996) can be seen in a Lawrence Norfolk article on the Tate Archive. 

• Postcard presses, designers and photographers - this disparate category includes the output of presses I've often referred to here, such as Coracle, Wild Hawthorn and Moschatel.  Among photographers Paul Greenleaf has dealt with landscape in projects like Correspondence (2007-9), where he re-photographed scenes from 1960s postcards.

• Political/polemical postcards - a category defined more by purpose than form, this includes Peter Kennard, one of the artists associated with the Leeds Postcards collective, whose oft-reproduced Haywain-Constable (1821) Cruise Missiles (1983) was produced as a postcard for CND.

• Graphic postcards - Thomas A. Clark's postcard for his Moschatel Press, below, is an example of a purely textual image; the book provides another one by Peter Liversidge printed in a font that looks as if it might disappear in snow: In the bleak mid-winter months very little stirs on the North Montana Plains (2000).

 Thomas A. Clark, Anything which is understood is a postcard to yourself, 2008

• Postcards as pictures  - lastly there is art in which postcard images are transferred into paintings, as in the photorealism of Malcolm Morley, or prints, like the Katharina Fritsch images of Essen that I've mentioned here previously.

The other artist I mentioned in that earlier post on Fritsch and postcard-based landscape art was Tacita Dean.  She is quoted in the introduction to Artists' Postcards: A Compendium: 'recently I have begun, quite unintentionally, to collect old postcards thematically.  It started with finding an attractive postcard of a frozen water fountain.  On finding the second frozen water fountain, I had begun a collection...'  Among her postcard-related works is Washington Cathedral (2002), two grids of non-identical found postcards published at different times; the cathedral was begun in 1907 and only finished in 1990 so these postcards represent a colorized dream of the yet-to-be-completed monument.  She also produced an edition of postcards linked to her film The Green Ray; I said here recently that the green flash of the setting sun is difficult to see on screen but it is visible in the postcard.   

Here is Jeremy Cooper's description (he is fond of exclamation marks) of another Tacita Dean postcard, Lorca's Olive (2007), inspired by a trip to Cadaqués, where 

'her host informed her that his grandfather used to tell of having seen the painter Salvador Dali and the poet flirting in a particular olive grove in the village!  Dean looked for the olive grove but discovered it had been destroyed by a fire, only one tree remaining.  She photographed the tree and made it into a postcard, as if from the 1920s, the time of the alleged affair, putting two coats of silver on the surface of the black-and-white photograph to give the impression of age.' 

This postcard is referred to at the end of a 2011 James Purcell review of an exhibition of personal postcards at the Federico García Lorca Foundation, curated by Martin Parr.  'The framed cards extend along the wall in an unbroken line. But look closer, and you can find the moment when Lorca’s correspondence ends. The family postcards themselves sweep on, albeit with gaps in time. No mention is made of the atrocities, grief and terror having been expressed elsewhere, privately...'  Tacita Dean's postcard, which featured in another exhibition at Lorca's house/museum in Grenada, can also be related to the writer's death.  After being killed by a Fascist militia his body was dumped among olive trees, or so it was thought.  'The postscript to the postcard: Lorca’s presumed grave was excavated in 2009, and was found to contain no bodies. To date, there is still no news of Lorca’s whereabouts.'

Where sea-grass tangles with shore-grass

The hard sand breaks,
And the grains of it
Are clear as wine.
Far off over the leagues of it,
The wind,
Playing on the wide shore,
Piles little ridges,
And the great waves
Break over it.

These are the opening lines of H.D.'s poem 'Hermes of the Ways', which was published in Ezra Pound's anthology Des Imagistes almost a hundred years ago.  It was one of the poems Pound had been shown in 1912 by the 'ardent young Hellenists', H.D. and Richard Aldington and which he sent in to Harriet Monroe's Poetry.  It was, he thought, "objective - no slither - direct - no excess of adjectives. etc.  No metaphors that won't permit examination. - It's straight talk - straight as the Greek!"  In The Pound Era Hugh Kenner describes the first three lines of this poem: 'perception slides over perception, each line the natural unit of the process ... one line of statement, its narrative implication (feet crushing salty dried shore) compressed to the uttermost; one line of microscopic attention, discerning the grains; one line of arresting comparison, casual and evaluative (like wine, this shore is welcome; like sand, the benison is equivocal).'

Hermes, Orator - Roman copy from the late 1st century CE-early 2nd century CE

 after a Greek original of the 5th century BC

In H.D.'s poem a statue of Hermes - the god of travellers, transitions and boundaries - stands 'where sea-grass tangles with / shore-grass.'  Nearby there is an orchard with twisted trees and small hard apples ripened late by 'a desperate sun / that struggles through sea-mist.'  The statue 'fronts the great dunes' where the wind rushes through coarse grass, crusted in salt.  A small white stream flows underground from a poplar-shaded hill and emerges on the sands.  'Hermes of the Ways' (as you can see at the Modernist Journals Project site) was published in the January 1913 edition of Poetry under the title 'Verses, Translations and Reflections from 'The Anthology''.  This is a reference to The Greek Anthology which has a group of epigrams by Anyte, including the one that H.D. adapted and expanded for her poem.  This prose translation of Anyte's poem is by Richard Aldington and was first published in 1915:

HERMES OF THE WAYS

I, Hermes, stand here at the cross-roads by the wind-beaten orchard, near the hoary-grey coast;

And I keep a resting-place for weary men. And the cool stainless spring gushes out.

Anyte of Tegea lived in Arcadia in the early third century BCE.  She seems to have been, as it says in my Penguin edition of The Greek Anthology, 'the first poet to write epitaphs on animals, and to introduce bucolic themes into epigram.'  Her epigram 'Hermes of the Ways' interests me both as a condensed landscape poem (orchard, coast and spring) and as the evocation of a landscape sculpture.  Another (given in Aldington's translation below) provides a contrasting image of a statue by the sea. In poems like this, Marylin B. Skinner has suggested that Anyte offers an 'introspective' approach to ekphrasis, in contrast to male poets' detached way of reporting a visual experience (see 'Ladies' Day at the Art Institute: Theocritus, Herodas and the Gendered Gaze'). 'Aphrodite's benevolent mood is mirrored in the translucent expanse of water viewed from her headland and transmuted into concern for the mariners she beholds from afar. In the third line, there is an abrupt switch in perspective to the reverent tremor of the water as it, in turn, observes the goddess' glistening statue.'

ENGRAVED ON A STATUE OF APHRODITE

This is the land of Kypris, since it pleases her to gaze for ever from land over the glittering sea.
So that she may bear the sailors safe to land; and the sea quivers, looking upon her shining image.


The Cyprus Mail reported earlier this year on plans to build a four-metre tall bronze statue of Aphrodite on a rock in the sea. Ten years ago a more controversial proposal for a hundred-foot statue based on Botticelli's Venus was stopped. 'Artists and environmentalists branded published photographs as ‘ugly’, and reminiscent of Hollywood and Las Vegas kitsch.  One artist said it looked like a cake.  The Chamber of Fine Arts (EKATE) said the idea of a Statue of Liberty sized goddess of love was “base, barbaric, morbid, bizarre, provocative, flashy, grotesque, monstrous, out of proportion, over the top, tacky, cheap, pointless and offensive”'.  Planning for the new project is in its early stages so it is not yet clear whether this bronze Aphrodite will one day be gazing over the glittering sea.  There are no such statues of gods in the other two 'landscape poems' of Anyte that survive in The Greek Anthology: just trees and spring waters and a cool breeze.  I think Ezra Pound's advice to poets in 'A Few Don'ts By an Imagiste', written for the March 1913 edition of Poetry, should be heeded by all those commissioning public artworks: 'Use either no ornament or good ornament'. 

TO A GIRL

Sit beneath the beautiful leaves of this laurel, and draw the sweet water from the fresh spring:
You are breathless from the heat; rest your dear limbs and let the breath of Zephyros touch them.

FOR A FOUNTAIN

O wanderer, rest your tired limbs under this elm; the breeze murmurs in the light-green branches. Drink a cool draught from the spring. This resting place is dear to wayfarers in the hot summer. 

Entertained with a rainbow

In an earlier post here I mentioned the chapter Edward Thomas devoted to John Aubrey in The Literary Pilgrim in England and his praise for the way Aubrey's description of places isolate telling details.  'Who but Aubrey would have noticed and entered in a book the spring after the fire of London "all the ruins were overgrown with an herb or two, but especially with a yellow flower, Ericolevis Neapolitana."' This attention to the more curious or illuminating facets of what he was writing about have made his biographical notes published posthumously as Brief Lives far more popular than many worthy but dull works by his contemporaries.  It occurred to me, browsing through a volume of these just now, that I might highlight here three of his subjects who had some connection with three of the arts of landscape: drawing, poetry and garden design.

Wenceslaus Hollar, St. Martin's Cathedral in Mainz, 1632

Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-77) was a Bohemian engraver, known now for his panoramic views of London. 'He told me,' writes Aubrey, 'that when he was a schoolboy he took a delight in drawing of maps; which drafts he kept, and they were pretty.  He was designed by his father to have been a lawyer, and was put to that profession, when his father's troubles, together with the wars, forced him to leave his country.  So that what he did for his delight and recreation only when a boy, proved to be his livelihood when a man.'  Hollar's talents were spotted by the Earl of Arundel, who engaged him as a draughtsman.  He travelled to Vienna with the Earl, 'very well clad', to 'take views, landscapes, buildings, etc remarkable in their journey, which we see now at the print shops.'  In 1637 he came with the Earl to England and 'at Arundel House, he married my lady's waiting woman, Mrs Tracy, by whom he has a daughter, that was one of the greatest beauties I have ever seen; his son by her died in the plague, an ingenious youth, who drew delicately.'

Hollar, we are told, was very shortsighted and his landscapes were done in such detail that they are 'not to be judged without a magnifying glass.'  During the Civil War he lived in Antwerp but returned in 1652.  'I remember he told me that when he first came into England (which was a serene time of peace) that the people, both poor and rich, did look cheerfully, but at his return, he found the countenances of the people all changed, melancholy, spiteful, as if bewitched.'  Hollar himself 'was a very friendly good natured man as could be, but shiftless as to the world [careless in his affairs] and died not rich.'

Wenceslaus Hollar, Landscape Face, unknown date

Sir John Denham (1615-69) is of interest here as the author of 'Cooper's Hill' (1642), the first English topographical poem.  Aubrey writes that at Oxford University, the young Denham 'would game extremely; when he had played away all his money, he would play away his father's wrought rich gold cups. ... From Trinity College he went to Lincoln's Inn, where (as Judge Wadham Windham, who was his contemporary, told me) he was as good a student as any in the house.'  Nevertheless, on one occasion 'having been merry at a tavern with his comrades, late at night, a frolic came into his head, to get a plasterer's brush and a pot of ink, and blot out all the signs between Temple Bar and Charing Cross' (they were caught - 'this I had from R. Estcott, esquire, who carried the inkpot').

Denham's play The Sophy was a huge success - the poet 'Mr Edmund Waller said then of him, that he '"broke out like the Irish Rebellion."'  His poem 'Cooper's Hill' was published after the Battle of Edgehill 'in a sort of brown paper, for then they could get no better.'  As a Royalist, Denham was not welcome during the Commonwealth but returned from abroad and eventually became Surveyor of the King's Work. 'In 1665 he married his second wife, a [Margaret] Brookes, a very beautiful young lady; Sir John was ancient and limping.  The Duke of York fell deeply in love with her, though (I have been morally assured) he never had carnal knowledge of her.  This occasioned Sir John Denham's distemper of madness ... but it pleased God that he was cured of this distemper, and wrote excellent verses, particularly on the death of Mr Abraham Cowley, afterwards.  His second lady had no child; was poisoned by the hands of the Countess of Rochester with chocolate.'

Aubrey gives us some details of Denham's physical appearance: thin hair, a slow gait, tall but 'a little incurvetting at his shoulders, not very robust.'  He 'was satirical when he had a mind to it' and 'his eye was a kind of light goose-grey, not big; but it had a strange piercingness, not as to shining and glory, but (like a Momus) when he conversed with you he looked into your very thoughts.'  He describes the delight Denham took in the landscape around his home - Camomile Hill, 'from the camomile that grows their naturally', and Prunewell Hill, 'where was a fine tuft of trees, a clear spring, and a pleasant prospect to the east.'  This house was near Cooper's Hill, 'incomparably well described by that sweet swan, Sir John Denham.'

Thomas Bushell (1594-1674) was a servant of Francis Bacon, from whom he learnt the science of metallurgy, and whose writings inspired him, after Bacon's death in 1626, to live for three years on the Isle of Lundy as a hermit.  Having married and moved to Oxfordshire, he designed for himself an extraordinary grotto with elaborate water features, including a silver ball that rose and fell on a jet of water and a sequence of fountains designed to surprise the ladies as they walked over them.  Aubrey says that it faced south 'so that when it artificially rains upon the turning of a cock [tap], you are entertained with a rainbow.  In a very little pond (no bigger than a basin) opposite to the rock, and hard by, stood (1643, August 8) a Neptune, neatly cut in wood, holding his trident in his hand, and aiming with it at a duck which perpetually turned round him, and a spaniel swimming after her.'  Bushell lived above this grotto in three rooms, one painted with Biblical stories concerning water, another with the story of Christ told in wall hangings and the third, a hermit's cell, hung in black baize.  In 1636 Bushell presented his 'Rock' to King Charles and Henrietta Maria to the accompaniment of music - Aubrey unhelpfully notes that 'I remember the student of Christ Church which sang the songs (I now forget his name)'. 

A year after the royal visit, Bushell was made King's farmer of minerals in Wales and spent the rest of his career putting Bacon's science into practise in a series of mining schemes. 'He had so delicate a way of making his projects alluring and feasible, profitable, that he drew to his baits not only rich men of no design, but also the craftiest knaves in the country ... As he had the art of running into debt, so sometimes he was attacked and thrown into prison; but he would extricate himself again strangely.'  Aubrey relates that after offending parliament or Cromwell, Bushell hid at his house in Lambeth Marsh, dating his letters as if they had been sent from overseas.  He had a room there hung all in black, with a painted skeleton and 'an emaciated dead man stretched out.  Here he had several mortifying and divine mottoes (he imitated his lord [Bacon] as much as he could) and out of his windows a very pleasant prospect.'  He was, according to Aubrey, 'a handsome proper gentleman when I saw him at his house aforesaid at Lambeth.  He was about 70, but I should not have guessed him hardly 60.  He had a perfectly healthy constitution; fresh, ruddy, face; hawk-nosed, and was temperate.'

 

Engraving showing Thomas Bushell's hermitage at Enstone,

from Robert Plot's Natural History of Oxfordshire, 1677.

(Aubrey read this and modelled his own unfinished book about Wiltshire on it)

KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE

 

 Still from Ka Mountain by OpenEndedGroup

In 1972 Robert Wilson and his avant-garde theatre group the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds staged a seven-day non-stop performance across an entire mountain landscape in Iran, called KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: a story about a family and some people changing.  Maria Shevtsova describes it in her book on Robert Wilson as 'a site-specific fantasia, a ritual and a pilgrimage across the seven hills of the arid rocky terrain of the Haft Tan Mountain.' It 'involved an old man's journey up one of these hills while a host of unconnected events occurred simultaneously on all seven.  Every day a different Byrd played the old man as if to suggest, by the change of actor, the idea of he seven stages through which human life supposedly passes.  The old man paused at various stations identified by cut-outs of such symbols of Western civilisation as Noah's Ark, the Acropolis and the New York skyline.  These served as relay points for the performers and were where the spectator-participants could stop and rest, if they had not dropped out already.  (Indeed, few managed to last the week.)'  A dinosaur stood at the summit and the performance ended with the face of a giant ape going up in flames.  But 'the mountain itself with its searing heat during the day and intense cold at night could be said to be the prime actor in this epic whose greatest significance probably lay in the personal inner journeys undergone by its makers.'

 Still from Ka Mountain by OpenEndedGroup

In an animated film made recently by the OpenEndedGroup, Robert Wilson describes his design for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE.  The image above shows a sketch of the setting for the 'Overture' to the performance: an oasis-like Sufi garden with a view up to the mountain.  This was where, as Osia Trilling, wrote in The Drama Review (June 1973), 'the audience was able to get a foretaste of some of what was to follow later.  Here they caught their first glimpse of the livestock Wilson had collected, some of them in uncomfortably small cages, including a bear, a lion, various horses, donkeys, poultry, deer, goats and an elephant.'  If this sounds a bit dodgy from the perspective of 2013, consider Wilson's unrealised plan to blow up the top of the mountain at the end of the seven-day pilgrimage...  'At this, the Shiraz Festival authorities, who had proved unusually accommodating until then, drew the line.'  How playful this proposal was is not clear: Trilling tried to elicit information from him in an amusingly unhelpful interview ("What is the meaning of Ka in your title?" - "I dunno.")  In the end Wilson was content to set an emblematic Chinese pagoda on fire - its cut-out form can be seen on the left next to the burning ape in the photograph below.  Basil Langton recalled the scene in, 'Journey to Ka Mountain': the landscape on this last night became 'a fiery torch that burned all night over the sleeping town of Shiraz - by accident or design, a symbol of "mountain theology" and the fire-worship of ancient Persia.'

Basil Langton's photograph of the burning ape on Ka Mountain

See The Drama Review, Vol 17, No. 2, June 1973

Footnote:
Paul Kaiser of OpenEndedGroup has alerted me to 'a huge new work we're making about a cross-section through the broken city of Detroit', which sounds like it will appeal to readers of this blog.  Their site includes earlier artworks and some fascinating writings, including something on the background to their film Ka Mountain.

A lion near Hymettos

One misty September morning in 1999 on the island of Naxos, my girlfriend and I set off in a taxi to find the kouros of Melanes.  As we drove along empty roads shaded with olive trees and past hillside farms and whitewashed churches our driver told us the story of how he had abandoned a career in the law, unable to bring himself to "tell lies".  He dropped us off near the site of the kouros - a recumbent statue 6 metres long, resting where it had been abandoned in the 6th century BC, probably because its leg had been broken.  Moved by the sight of this ancient, weathered youth, we wanted to see a second, less well-preserved kouros that apparently lay somewhere nearby.  An old lady in the neighbouring orchard spoke no English, but fortunately a passing German hiker spoke some Greek and he asked her how to find it.  We would have to climb over the rocks of the ancient quarry: "you have to be like a sheep".  And so started up a rough track before heading off across the hillside, picking our way between thistles and thorns and crumbling dry-stone walls.  There was still a low mist obscuring the distant peaks and everything was quiet.  At last we saw it, lying prone and heavily eroded among the marble boulders.  The photograph I took (below) hardly conveys the experience of that moment, when the deep past seemed seemed both present and impossibly remote.

In October 1805, Edward Dodwell came across another giant statue in the Greek landscape.  This colossal marble lion, its legs broken, lay undisturbed in the mountains of Hymettos.  But it must have been too desirable to be left there for travellers to come upon, and was eventually removed to a museum in Athens before ending up by the chapel of Agios Nikolaus at Kantza.  I have looked this place up online and all I can find is one tiny photograph of the lion, caged behind white railings.  I wonder how many people ever go to see it there?  The painting Doswell made can be seen in the British Museum's 'In Search of Classical Greece: Travel Drawings of Edward Dodwell and Simone Pomardi 1805–1806'.  The centrepiece of this exhibition is a panorama of Athens, seen from the Hill of the Muses, near the Monument to Philopappos (where, incidentally, Giovanni Battista Lusieri was also sketching that year, as I mentioned in a previous post).  Athens then was little more than a village at the base of the Acropolis; in 1999 we found a polluted urban sprawl and taxi drivers unwilling to stop for us.  It is easy to imagine urbanisation overtaking the 'lone and level sands' round the broken statue of Shelley's Ozymandius, his great shattered head with its 'wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command' long since gone, removed and lost to view in some unvisited suburb.

Edward Dodwell, Lion near Hymettos, looking north towards Mount Pentele, 1805

A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain

Three years ago the Folio Society published a new edition of William Daniell's A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain.  The original book came out in eight volumes between 1814 and 1825, contained 308 hand-coloured aquatints and sold for £60 ('one and a half times what a fisherman or sailor aboard a merchant ship could expect to earn in a year at the time').  A second hand copy of the Folio version (in the excellent Much Ado Books shop) cost me rather less than this.  It includes only 114 of the best aquatints and cuts out almost all of the rather dry commentary Daniell wrote, replacing it with extracts from the writings of contemporary travellers.  The original intention was for Richard Ayton, an aspiring writer and friend of the family, to accompany Daniell on his travels.  But the two of them parted acrimoniously after the first year, having got as far as southern Scotland (the Voyage commenced at Land's End). Daniell pressed on alone, returning to his coastal journey every summer, delayed only by famine in Scotland (1816) and economic crisis and fear of revolution in England (1819).  Ayton never did become a successful author and his short life came to a sad end the year Daniell finally completed his great project.  The cumulative achievement of the Voyage was recognised by the Royal Academy, who elected Daniell a full member in 1822 - as C. J. Shepherd notes in his introduction, 'the artist that he beat to secure his lifetime's ambition was John Constable'.

Among the texts assembled to accompany Daniell's aquatints in this edition, the most vivid impressions of the coastal landscape are provided by writers like Keats, Southey, Scott and Dorothy Wordsworth (whose travels in Scotland I have discussed here before).  But the book encompasses many other interesting voices - Joanna Schopenhauer at Lancaster, Jane Austen at Lyme, the 'exquisitely fashionable' Hermann von Pückler-Muskau in Brighton, James Johnson, author of 'An Essay on Indigestion; or Morbid Sensibility of the Stomach and Bowels', in Liverpool, a gentleman called Charles Cochrane who for some reason went to Margate disguised as an itinerant Spanish gypsy guitarist, the ornithologist Charles Fothergill who visited Flamborough Head 'resplendent in 'white and green hat; a Belcher neckcloth with my short collar appearing over it; a dark green jacket with silver buttons; [and] sky blue pantaloons'', composer Felix Mendelssohn, who sent home a few bars of music which would become the Hebridean Overture, and the 'excitable young Polish tutor and future revolutionary' Krystyn Lach-Szyrma, who was so overwhelmed by Fingal's Cave, a 'glorious cathedral made by nature's hand', that he threw himself into the sea.

Cover by David Eccles,

after William Daniell's In Fingal's Cave, Staffa

In his Preface to A Voyage Round the Coast of Great Britain, Robert Macfarlane writes that seeing Daniell's aquatints leads us to imagine Britain only by its outline.  'The interior falls away, and all that is left is the frame.  And what a frame it is!  Some 7,500 miles of coastline, forming a continuum from storm-crashed headlands to beach-front amusements, from salt-marsh to heathland, from 400-million-year-old gneiss to endlessly recast mudflats.'  With this in mind it is clearly impossible to pick out a typical view - the two shown below I liked for the non-naturalistic regularity of their rock formations and the precisely distributed seabirds and grazing sheep.  Yet despite their variety all of Daniell's aquatints have the same harmonious, muted palette of slate blue, grey green and pale browns.  He may, as Macfarlane says, portray all kinds of meteorological conditions - 'a doldrummish sea day in Ilfracombe, sails drooping in the heat, gives way to a Force 7 off Holyhead' - but the weather somehow always looks British.    

 Near view of one of the Shiant Isles

Needles Cliff and Needles, Isle of White

William Daniell's journeys coincided with the rise of picturesque tourism and bathing resorts, the Napoleonic Wars, the Highland Clearances and the rapid development of industry and infrastructure.  Robert Southey, for example, toured the Highlands with Thomas Telford, whom he nicknamed Pontifex Maximus, the great bridge builder. In one of this book's extracts from Southey's Journal of a Tour in Scotland in 1819, the conversion of the Marquess of Stafford's estate's into extensive sheep-farms is criticised: 'a quiet, thoughtful, contented, religious people' forcefully transplanted from the glens to the sea coast.  At the other end of Britain, Dover had recently been scarred by vast new fortifications to keep out the French, a fact that William Cobbett found perplexing - 'what the devil should they come to this hill for, then?'  He concluded bitterly that 'more brick and stone have been buried in this hill than would go to build a neat new cottage for every labouring man in the counties of Kent and of Sussex!' Shakespeare's Cliff (which I have written about here before) was also visited by artist Benjamin Robert Hayden who stood looking at it, 'almost lost in the embruno tint of twilight'.  There he imagined 'a Colossal Statue of Britannia' built on top of it, 'surveying France with a lofty air.'

I could go on, but I'll end this post at Lulworth Cove, where Daniell painted the rocky outcrop of Stair Hole with its striking recumbent folds.  The book includes an extract from the recollections of the Irish playwright John O'Keeffe who spent a summer at Lulworth with his children.  As soon as he arrived, O'Keeffe set off with his son, called Tottenham, to explore the Cove itself and the craggy rocks above.  At the end of the day 'we returned to our abode with appetites sea-sharpened, and sat down to a roast loin of lamb, delicate boiled chickens, tongue, green-peas, young potatoes, a gooseberry pie, thick cream, good strong home-brewed ale and a glass of tolerable port-wine.'  Next morning they were off again, climbing Hanbury Hill where O'Keeffe recorded two of the local landscape terms - patches of land called 'knaps, larger or smaller, each divided from the other by a grassy rising, termed a launchet.'  Tired from the climb, he and Tottenham sat down to look at the view - 'before us, the great expanse; above, the blue serene; around, the melody of birds; scarce a breath from the still bosom of the deep, and the vertical sun shedding his glories on the scene.  Neither the scream of sea-gulls, crows, and puffins, could prevent me falling into a slumber, and, in a sort of sweet demi-dream, I could hear the rushing pinions of birds that must have flown by very near me, and felt the rabbits that I fancied ran over me.'

The Cerne Abbas Giant

In what ways can landscape archaeology be considered a form of landscape art?  Matthew Johnson's Ideas of Landscape (2007) traces the roots of the discipline (at least in its English version) to Romanticism and draws parallels between W.G. Hoskins (whose The Making of the English Landscape I've mentioned here before) and Wordsworth.  They were both solitary walkers, interested in the local (the genius loci) and the national, combining direct bodily experience with intuitive understanding, traveling in imagination into the past, gazing on the landscape from a social and physical distance and with a degree of expert knowledge, viewing the landscape aesthetically and translating it into text.

Johnson argues that landscape archaeologists working on prehistoric (rather than historic) sites have tended to operate more objectively and certainly in the US have been more open to theory.  One could perhaps draw parallels here with English and American land artists - Richard Long shares many of the Romantic characteristics listed above, in contrast to, say, Robert Smithson.   Johnson discusses some of the tools of landscape archaeology - maps, aerial photography and the hachured plan.  Ostensibly objective and empirical, they are 'complicit in a Romantic view of the world - each invites the observer to gaze down on the landscape like Wordsworth in the Lakes.'  Land artists have used photographs and maps extensively to document their earthworks but this book made me think there's some untapped potential in hachured plans...

In contrasting the attitudes of archaeologists to history and prehistory, Johnson discusses the Cerne Abbas Giant.  This mysterious work of art in the landscape has been taken to be prehistoric, since it could not be linked to Christian imagery and there were no historic documents relating to its creation.  But neither of these factors precludes a later date - 'Ronald Hutton (1999) has argued convincingly that it in fact sits longside a 17th century landscape of politics and conflict between king and Parliament.'  A third view has been put forward by Barbara Bender (an academic who, fifty years ago, was a college friend of my mother's.)  She suggests that the specific date of origin does not matter - 'the Giant has to be scoured and re-scoured every generation; it takes its place, and its historical importance, as part of a continuing tradition that links the past to the present.'

The Cerne Abbas Giant
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Northumberlandia

"Goddess with 100ft breasts to rival Angel of the North" was how The Times reported Charles Jencks' plans for Northumberlandia, a vast sculpture and park to be created from land owned by a mining company.  Jencks said, "when finished you will see the most incredible curvaceous woman lying there with her left leg over the right and her hair spread out.”  Melvyn Bragg said tactfully that "the idea of walking over a reclining woman may not appeal to everyone’s tastes."

As the Telegraph reported a few months ago, 'plans for the sculpture, which will be visible from the A1, were originally blocked by Northumberland County Council in 2006 after 2,500 people objected to the proposals.  But after a successful appeal to the Government by the Durham based The Banks Group, which runs the mine, the Goddess will now be able to go ahead.'  The article goes on to say that 'Northumberland County Council was unable to comment, but county councillor Wayne Daley told the BBC the Goddess was "ridiculous". "If we wanted something like this why didn't we just ask Jordan to open a theme park," he said.  "It really is ridiculous to think that something like a naked woman, who is only there as a result of all of the slag and the coal from the mine, is a good way of attracting people to Cramlington."

At the News Post Leader site I read:
'Q) In light of the north east's position near the top of UK league tables for teenage pregnancies and one-night stands, how can Banks justify sanctioning the land-sculpting of a naked pagan goddess, calling it Northumberlandia and claiming it as a "gateway to Northumberland"? (Morag Forsyth, Cramlington).
A) Speaking about the inspiration behind Northumberlandia, Charles Jencks said: "Northumberlandia does not relate to a particular goddess or religion, it is a landscape which incorporates references to the human body towards which we have a natural empathy. The landform can be enjoyed in parts and within many different contexts including the distant landscape, the causeways, lakes and willow islands, and viewing pavilions."'

You can see artist impressions of Northumberlandia at designboom. The conical terraced breasts of Jencks' proposal reminded me of the image of Germania below, one of Martin Warnke's examples of giant figures in his rich and fascinating book, Political Landscape.  In the presence of the all-powerful mother Germania, 'only adulation or death is admissable'.  Giants like Germania represent the state as an active figure, unleashing 'traumas associated with all-consuming power.'  But standing figures can be unstable, as we know from the Colossus of Rhodes, which collapsed after an earthquake.  Warnke quotes the scultpor Ludwig Schwanthaler, whose Bavaria (1837) is another giant personification of place, confidently asserting "no earthquake will cast this down... the Bavaria is the greatest statue ever cast."
 

One People - One Reich

Austrian propoganda poster, 1928

Warnke finds earlier examples of giants in art that took a more horizontal form - passive figures seen lying on their back.  For example, there is the body of a city depicted as a resting giant in the Bizarreries of G. B. Braccelli (1624).  Or Joos de Momper's Head-Landscape (before 1635) over which people are seen happily walking.  Or a profile of the coastline of Brazil, in the travel journal of J. B. Debret (1834), which is 'reminiscent of a dead Christ and so reinforces the impression of paralysed power'.  Northumberlandia resembles these images, and in a region once known for the power of its mining industry, this giant recumbert nude will be another example of a political landscape.

The lost gardens of Richmond Palace

Those detailed scenes visible through a window behind the sitter in Renaissance portraits often seem like glimpses of lost landscapes. Here is a specific example, from the portrait of Henry Prince of Wales (1594-1612) by Robert Peake. The youthful heir to James I was a patron of the arts who sought to create a spectacular garden at Richmond.



In the words of James Maxwell:

To plant and build he had a great delight,
Old ruins his sole presence did repair;
Orchards and gardens forthwith at his sight
Began to sprout and spring, to flourish fair...

However, almost before these gardens had had a chance to flourish, Henry died, and work on it was halted.

Roy Strong, in The Renaissance Garden in England, discusses the evidence we have on the appearance of these lost gardens, which ‘must have constituted a remarkable spectacle, conceived as they seem to have been on a vast scale.’ The Works Accounts refer to the creation of three artificial islands, one of which may be discernable in the garden vista within Peake’s portrait of Henry. It is possible that one of the islands was created in the shape of a vast river god, modelled on Giambologna’s giant at Pratolino. A contemporary described the erection of a ‘great figure... three times as large as the one at Pratolino, with rooms inside, a dove-cot in the head and grottoes in the base.’ Salomon de Caus, the chief designer at Richmond, included a couple of illustrations of giants in his Les raisons des forces mouvantes (1615). The one here has an old bearded head like the giant of Giambologna and a rugged but strangely feminine body.

Like the vague and tantalising view in the portrait of Henry, there may be echoes and memories of the lost gardens at Richmond in the literature of the time. Roy Strong wonders whether Inigo Jones’ scenery for Ben Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue recalls an island giant: ‘The scene was the mountain Atlas, who had his top ending in the figure of an old man, his head and beard all hoary and frost as if his shoulders were covered with snow; the rest wood and rock.’ And then there is The Tempest, where we seem ‘to be wondering through a garden by de Caus where we are suddenly confronted by dreamlike monsters, or entering a wild grotto to be struck suddenly, at the turn of a stopcock, with surprise and wonder at moving statues and magical music, as gods and goddesses spring to life and enact an intermezzo.’